How to Write a Film Distribution Plan Before You Shoot

Distribution sounds like the last step, but several of its decisions come long before the film is finished.

• The Partners

  Distributors and sales agents often commit before the shoot, which helps the film get made. When Screen Australia, the federal screen agency, analyzed 119 applications for feature films, 97% included an advance from a distributor for Australia and New Zealand in their finance plans, and 96% had a sales agent attached for the rest of the world (Screen Australia (opens in a new tab)). Partners who commit that early want to know where the film is going.

• The Premiere

  A film has one world premiere, and the festivals that want it set rules around it. For its 2027 edition, Sundance takes open submissions of US features only if they keep that status: a film shown to the public anywhere before February 1, 2027, whether at a festival, on television or online, is not eligible (Sundance Institute (opens in a new tab)). One public screening at home can take a festival off your list.

• The Rights

  Every deal grants rights to show the film in a territory, in a medium, for a period of time. An exclusive right given to one partner cannot go to the next, so the plan says early which rights each route needs and which you keep.

• The Film Itself

  Where a film will play changes what you make and deliver: versions, subtitles, the music you clear, the files and paperwork each partner asks for. Planned ahead, these are budget lines. Found late, they are delays.

The Content Model Canvas (the Canvas), which fits a film's business plan on a single page, gives distribution two of its nine blocks: Channels for the routes, and Key Partners for the people who run them with you.

Most independent films reach their audience through a mix of five routes, and each asks for something in return: a premiere, a set of rights, a stretch of exclusive time or your own work.

• Festivals

  A festival gives a film its first audience, its first reviews and sometimes an award, and the biggest bring buyers. It asks for an entry fee, a screening copy and your time, and many want a premiere, which you can give only once. It introduces a film but does not release it.

• Sales Agents

  A sales agent sells the film to buyers abroad, territory by territory, mostly at film markets. It asks for the rights to those territories for a set term, and takes a commission and its costs from what it collects.

• Distributors

  A distributor brings the film out in one territory: it books the cinemas, runs the release and often licenses the film on to television and streaming there. It asks for the rights in its territory, usually across several media and for several years.

• Broadcasters and Platforms

  A television channel or a streaming service licenses the film for a window, a period when only it can show the film in a territory. A platform that wants every territory at once can close most of the other routes.

• Direct to Audience

  You keep some rights and use them yourself: screenings with groups who care about the film, licenses for schools and clubs, rentals and sales you run online. It asks for rights no one else holds, a way to reach the people who want the film, and your time.

A route earns its cost only if your audience is at the end of it, so the plan works backward from the audience. If you have not defined yours yet, start with how to define the target audience for your film. Four answers then shape most of the plan.

• Where your core audience watches films picks the first route: cinemas, the clubs, halls or classrooms where it gathers, or television and streaming at home.

• Who has reached that audience before picks the partners. A distributor whose recent releases drew the same viewers already knows how to find them.

• How the wider audience will hear about the film sets the order. If word of mouth from the core audience will bring it, the routes that reach the core come first. Releases also tend to run from where each viewing costs the viewer most, in cinemas and at events, to rentals and sales, then to subscription services and television.

• Where your audience lives draws the territories. An audience mostly in your own country can be reached through a local distributor, or by you. One spread across many countries needs a sales agent.

Together, they turn a wish list into a sequence, with the rights each step needs.

In Night Shift Chorus, an independent comedy-drama, the staff who work nights at a city hospital form a choir to save their ward. The script is finished, a director has signed on, and the producer is assembling the finance plan.

Her audience is settled: amateur choir singers and the relatives and friends who fill their concerts, then hospital workers and anyone who enjoys gentle, funny stories about ordinary people. Knowing it has already brought the budget down and shaped the release: screenings that open with a choir from the town, and a singalong cut for choir outings. What the plan does not say yet is how the pieces fit.

• The premiere goes to a festival with an audience award, where a full house is the film's best argument. She accepts that this closes the festivals that insist on a premiere, rather than wait on one that may never select the film. Other audience festivals follow, all before the release.

• At home, the distributor takes the cinema rights, events included, then rentals and sales online. The broadcaster's window opens when the event run ends, a date written into both contracts, so the choirs spread the word before the wider audience finds the film on television. The broadcaster agrees that choirs can keep booking singalong screenings during its window: people come to those to sing, which television does not replace.

• Abroad, the sales agent takes every other territory and sells them one at a time, with the choir events in its pitch as a release that buyers can copy.

• She keeps the screenings outside cinemas at home, for choirs, hospitals and community groups that show the film in their own halls, and licenses them herself after the cinema run.

• The music is cleared before the shoot for every medium and territory in the plan, singalong cut included: a song sung on camera cannot be replaced in the edit.

There is still no amount on the page. Each partner can already see what it gets, what it does not and when its turn comes, which is what it will ask before it signs.

A distribution plan does not stand alone: its routes depend on the audience, and its partners on what the film can do for them.

If you came looking for a film distribution plan template, start with the Channels and Key Partners blocks of the free one-page film business plan template. Fill in those two for your film, and the seven around them show what your routes depend on.

When you are ready for the other blocks, work through your film's whole business plan with the Canvas. Its online tutorial covers the nine blocks one at a time, so the whole plan is ready before you shoot.